The CHRONOS research centre at Royal Holloway University of London invites you to the ‘CHRONOS 2021 distinguished on-line lecture’ with Prof Martin Kornberger, 23 September 2021, 2-4pm UK time (via MS team).
About CHRONOS
CHRONOS is the Centre for Critical and Historical Research on Organization and Society. Our guiding purpose is to uncover the social and cultural dimensions and implications of any subject matter, interrogating and questioning mainstream approaches and practices as a way to make a positive difference for organisations, markets and society. We are based at the School of Business and Management at Royal Holloway, but we work with colleagues in other disciplines at Royal Holloway, especially History and Geography, and through partnerships with research groups at other institutions within and outside the UK. For more information visit our website.
Our main work streams are on:
- Bureaucracy, Accountability and Control;
- Critical Consumption and the Politics of Markets;
- Identity and working life;
- Silent Voices: Feminist and Subaltern Perspectives;
- Space and Time in Organizations.
Director of CHRONOS: Prof. Elena Giovannoni (Elena.giovannoni@rhul.ac.uk)
Prof. Martin Kornberger will be talking about:
THE EMERGENCE OF A SOCIAL ACTOR:
THE CASE OF THE VIENNA CITY ADMINISTRATION AT THE FIN THE SIÈCLE
Abstract
This manuscript reports results of a preliminary inquiry into the formation of the City of Vienna as collective social actor at the turn of the 20th century. We use computational text analysis of administrative reports from 1867 to 1913 and an archival case-study to explain drastic increases in administrative capacity and autonomy during the Fin de Siècle. In its most formative period, the city was recovering from an economic crash and bureaucratic rationality was challenged by intellectuals and illiberal politicians alike. These conditions are inconsistent with legal-rational and institutional theories that explain the formation of organizational actorhood in the contemporary era; our analysis shows that the city’s formation reflected neither expansionist ideology nor the ambitions of a political machine nor delegation from a crumbling Empire. Instead, we observe the formation of the city as a collective social actor as a process in which (1) the capacity to act of the city’s administrative apparatus develops hand in hand with (2) the city’s increasingly differentiated and complex vision of its environment. Our analysis of this feedback loop contributes to sociological theories of actorhood and the understanding of the progressive welfare model as driven by categorical differentiation.
Short bio
Martin Kornberger received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Vienna in 2002. Currently he holds a Chair in Strategy at the University of Edinburgh and is a visiting fellow at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. His research focuses on strategies for and organization of new forms of distributed and collective action. He can be reached at martin.kornberger@ed.ac.uk
To attend the lecture, please email: elena.giovannoni@rhul.ac.uk
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